Confronting Categorical Assumptions About the Power of Religion in Africa

This paper is based on a workshop organised by ROAPE on religion and politics in Africa held at the University of Leeds in February 2006. Some of the arguments made in the paper concerning detotalisation and deconversion were developed through discussions at a workshop on history and anthropology held at the University of Manchester in November 2005.

Abstract

This article examines the place of religion in social science accounts of Africa, particularly as they relate to politics and culture. It explores the significance of representational continuities across the twentieth century and across disciplines which present African social life as religiously determined, and considers the political implications of African exceptionalism as a mode of analysis and policy rationale. Finally, the article considers some directions of institutional change in southern Tanzania and the consequences for understanding religion.

This paper is based on a workshop organised by ROAPE on religion and politics in Africa held at the University of Leeds in February 2006. Some of the arguments made in the paper concerning detotalisation and deconversion were developed through discussions at a workshop on history and anthropology held at the University of Manchester in November 2005.

I am grateful to other contributors at both workshops for their inputs which have influenced my thinking, in particular to Conrad Leyser, Kate Cooper, John Peel, Terence Ranger, Lionel Cliffe, Janet Bujra and Ebenezer Obadare. Thanks also to Alex Golub for the lead on Levi Strauss. Insights from fieldwork in Tanzania were gained during revisits in 2003 and 2005. Thanks to Hassan Mshinda of the Ifakara Centre for Health and Development Research, to Simeon Mesaki of the University of Dar es Salaaam and to Shaibu Magungu for their support and assistance. Costs of these visits were met by the UK Economic and Social Research Council though its Global Poverty Research Programme.

Notes

This paper is based on a workshop organised by ROAPE on religion and politics in Africa held at the University of Leeds in February 2006. Some of the arguments made in the paper concerning detotalisation and deconversion were developed through discussions at a workshop on history and anthropology held at the University of Manchester in November 2005.

1. Recent examples include Comaroff and Comaroff (1993); Moore and Sanders (2001); Geshiere (1997); Ashford (2005).

2. South Africa, Namibia and Botswana are an exception to this, having extended their social welfare provision and enhanced the range of public support available to vulnerable people, through such instruments as old age pensions, child support grants and support for fostered children. For an overview see Seekings (2002).

3. Horton is aware how his piece can be interpreted, as a denial of the potentiality of equivalence. He maintains that this is not intended, and that his argument pertains only the specialist culture of science on the one hand and the domain of African religious specialists on the other. In actuality, Horton, insists, the ‘Western layman’ is as far from the scientists and the ‘African peasant’ (1967b:186).

4. For accounts of conversion see Horton (1971, 1975), Peel (2003). For critiques of idealist theological version of the conversion narrative see Fisher (1974) and Fernandez (1978).

5. Indeed, the gradual transformation of Protestant Christianity away from materiality and towards the inner soul, and hence associated understandings of religion as a matter of the spirit rather than total person, is relatively recent and localised within the history of Christianity (Asad, 2003:37). The majority of Christianities the world over remain oriented towards embodied religious experience with an emphasis on materiality as the mediator between person and divine power.